Well, that escalated fast. Barely a week ago, Séamus Culleton was a national martyr, cruelly detained in a modern-day 'concentration camp' in El Paso for the crime of simply wanting to make a new life for himself.
He was a hard-working man who fled the financial crash in 2008, a plasterer struggling to find work when the economy tanked, like many an Irish emigrant before him.
He might have overstayed his 90-day visa, but that just made him 'undocumented' rather than 'illegal' in the States, and left-wing commentators and politicians swiftly demanded that the Taoiseach prioritise his case with Donald Trump on St Patrick's Day.
Labour leader Ivana Bacik posted a video on TikTok last Wednesday, saying she had just raised Culleton's 'appalling detention' with Micheál Martin in the Dáil, and that she was 'horrified' that he could offer 'no sense of urgency in seeking to secure the release' of this fine, upstanding, self-made businessman.
Let's just park, for a second, the fact that Culleton is not actually being detained by the US authorities. He is free to leave El Paso at any time; they'll even give him $2,600 and pay for his flight if he agrees to return home, but he is fighting to stay in the States.
And the tiniest bit of journalistic research—basically a quick Google search was all it took—soon revealed that Culleton might have had good reason for his reluctance to return to the old sod. He'd been facing drugs charges when he left the country in 2008 and a bench warrant issued for his arrest wasn't executed because he had fled the jurisdiction.
Still, that was hardly a federal case—lots of folk dabble in drugs in their foolish youth and, if he ever planned on emigrating to the States, it was a clever move to go before he had a drugs conviction on his record.
But, as our sister paper The Irish Mail on Sunday revealed at the weekend, it wasn't just drugs charges that the Kilkenny man was fleeing when he hooked it to Boston in 2008.
He was also leaving his twin baby daughters, Melissa and Heather, to be brought up alone by their single mother, Maggie Morrissey, without a penny in child support.
And when he gave that self-pitying interview from the detention centre, where he has actively chosen to remain, on radio last week, he had still to learn the lesson that all deadbeat dads eventually grasp: the babies you ran out on, deserted, discarded and left in financial peril don't stay babies forever.
And they don't forget.
Truly, karma is a real bitch. Of all the tens of thousands of 'undocumented' Irish that ICE could have nicked and placed in what sounds like a nightmarish camp, of all the genuinely industrious, upstanding Irish citizens who also left this country in hard times and who'd deserve all the political capital the Government could expend on their behalf, they had to go and pick the guy with the outstanding drugs charges and the abandoned kids.
And he had to find out, via media reports, that the daughters he left behind in 2008 had grown into a pair of smart, gobby and mad-as-hell young women who were not going to hold their whisht.
As they say in Kilkenny, Heather and Melissa didn't leave a tooth on their father's reputation when they got their chance. He was, they said, 'scandalous' and 'not the man people think he is' - their mother had not received 'a penny' in child maintenance since he 'abandoned' them at the age of 18 months.
'He was making himself out to be a saint, like he's done nothing wrong,' said Heather, yet 'he knows that there are warrants for his arrest and that was going to come out.'
He was the one who went to the media, she said, when his history was 'public knowledge'. They were shocked, they said, when they heard him plead for Government help on Liveline.
'I'm sorry now,' Heather added,'but I think it's just so funny how he can ring the news and Tiffany [his wife in the US] and his sister,but couldn't ring me or my sister.'
The twins started messaging him on social media when they discovered he was their father at age 12; eventually texting him asking why he wasn't responding to their approaches.
They had intermittent contact over the years,but he told them he was never coming home. When they celebrated their 18th birthday last year,they asked him for a present ‘for a joke’ and were surprised when he sent them €1,000 each. But they were hurt when his wife Tiffany pleaded for him to be returned to her and their ‘babies’ – two dogs.
‘He has children,’ said Heather. ‘His dogs aren’t his children.’
And the sisters were upset when a GoFundMe (or GoFoolMe as a friend of mine calls it) campaign raised €25,000 for his legal fees, pointing out that the sum was nearly the equivalent of the child support he never paid: ‘They’re taking the piss out of people.’
Not for long, perhaps.
Among the thousands of messages on social media, following the Mail’s revelation, was one from a US lawyer offering to pursue the GoFundMe money, pro bono, in lieu of 19 years’ worth of child support.
Had he kept his head down, quietly fought his case with low-key diplomatic assistance (he was in the process of obtaining a Green Card when the ICE-men cameth), Séamus Culleton might well have succeeded in staying in the States. As a white Irishman with no criminal convictions, he was hardly a priority for ICE.
Instead, he chose to cast himself as the victimised poster-boy for the worthy Irish undocumented, industrious and blameless citizens all, for whom a quiet word in Trump’s ear over a bowl of shamrock might have been a game-changer. Alas for all our anxious illegals, he was not quite the hero they needed.
Whoever said there was no such thing as bad publicity?
It's hard to imagine a simpler foodstuff to make than pancakes, and yet it seems that today, Pancake Tuesday, strikes terror and uncertainty into many souls.
A new study suggests that the custom of using up rich ingredients before the austerity of Lent is both baffling and scary to Gen Z folk, and indeed causes anxiety in older generations, too.
Many admit they have no idea how to make them from scratch, don't 'feel confident' enough to try, and will opt out of the tradition altogether.
I know that Gen Z are easily 'triggered', but being intimidated by a batter of milk, eggs and flour is a whole new realm of snowflakiness. I do, however, sympathise with one element of their angst: like 60% of young folk, I have never flipped a pancake either, despite having made hundreds over the years - it always seems like the quickest way to see your supper end up on the floor.
Walking my dog yesterday morning I saw a most unusual sight - in a coffee shop window, a poster saying 'Free Iran'.
There's no shortage of Palestinian flags around here, but for some reason the genocide of its own people by the Iranian regime - they killed more in two weeks than died in Gaza in a year - has escaped the attention of our lefties.
They love a good protest, normally, but Dublin was one of the few global cities that didn't stage a march in support of brave Iranian citizens standing up to the medieval mullahs last Saturday.
Hundreds of thousands marched in Munich, Toronto, Sydney, LA and Lisbon among many others; but here... not a peep. Maybe the Iranians need a nice scarf like a keffiyeh so lefties can make a fashion statement. Or maybe it really is a case of no Jews no news.
The new revamped Confirmation pledge will ask 12- and 13-year-olds to forego cigarettes and vapes as well as drink and drugs.
It's a timely move by the Church since that age group is most vulnerable to what Taoiseach Micheál Martin above called 'the revenge of the tobacco industry', the shameless recruiting of young smokers with candy-flavoured nicotine-laced vapes for pocket-money prices.
I'm not sure the pledge itself will dissuade any impressionable teen from trying a vape if their friends are indulging but it might prompt a conversation between children and parents who may be unaware their kids are being lured into lifelong addiction.
It beats me how these things came to be cool anyway - it's easy to see how icons like James Dean made cigarettes sexy but vaping just looks like you're sucking on a highlighter pen.